dementia care, cognitive decline

For wanderers and caregivers – another long-awaited device. Beware of pre-announcements. So GTX has announced that the long-awaited GPS shoe (let's call that 'footware') will be available in October (that’s now!) for $299, enabling a geo-fence to be set for the wearer, alerting when the shoe travels outside of the specified area. From the NY Times article, the argument for the GPS shoe came from Andrew Carle, the coiner of ‘Nana technology’ and a professor at George Mason University. He suggested the idea to Aetrex, the shoe manufacturer, which first announced that it was going to begin product testing in 2009.   I got pretty excited by that in 2009, but after placing a call every six months to learn that it was not available, I gave up.

Something different -- a positive study of aging and cognitive decline.  Last week in the midst of worse and most worse economic news, USA Today published the results of a decade-long study through Duke, Harvard and others that tracked 1049 older adults age aged 56-102 who at the beginning of the study showed no signs of dementia.  At the end of the study, two-thirds of the participants showed at most only “slow cognitive decline,” not the level of decline typically associated with requiring assistance or medical care. Why is this interesting? Remember the often-quoted statistic that nearly 50% of seniors aged 85+ suffer from Alzheimer’s? This study undermines that estimate and therefore the domino effect of the assumptions that are derived from it.

Innovation is alive and well in the aging in place technology space although it hasn't all been recently catalogued here.  So catching up with some recent press releases and product announcements from the April to June timeframe, here are more technologies for helping older adults. Each of these will include information from the vendor and a link to learn more at their website -- in addition, you may find a vendor press release in that category of this site (lower right side of home page). In no particular order: